This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide, which is available for purchase.
The paper-based bidding process hasn’t changed much with the times. In fact, many institutional bid submission practices remain trapped in a tendering time warp, frozen throwbacks to the pre-internet era; however, this is quickly changing. This section explains how inherent systemic inefficiencies, accelerating timeframes, trade treaty developments, and technological innovations are all converging to convert our out-dated bidding systems into a paperless procurement process.
Systemic Inefficiency and Waste
It’s a tale of two technological eras trapped within a single tendering cycle. While electronic posting may be the mainstream standard for most if not all public institutions, this technological advancement has only served to obscure the technological atrophy that continues to plague the bidding stage of the tendering process. While tender calls can be downloaded electronically at any time of day and night, many public institutions continue to manage manual bid receipt processes, where bids are only accepted in paper form during business hours, at prescribed locations, within strictly enforced timeframes. In addition to being slow and inefficient, this paper-based bidding process creates a colossal carbon footprint. Add up the thousands of bidding processes run by public institutions globally every day, multiply those competitions by the number of suppliers who respond to each tender call, and then multiply that number by the multiple copies of each bid that has to be shipped to the purchasing institutions only to then require long-term storage for institutional archiving and record retention purposes, and what you get is a growing mountain of waste. Time is running out on these soon-to-be-extinct paper-bound tendering practices.
Increasing Time Pressures
With ever-accelerating time pressures, institutions need to increase tendering cycle efficiencies somehow. The planning and drafting stages of the procurement process are already squeezed to the breaking point, as are the post-bidding evaluation and contract finalization stages. These put purchasing institutions under greater pressure to shorten the period between tender call posting and bid submission. However, in a system where the bidding window can determine whether a supplier responds to a tender call, and in an environment where lawsuits are fought over bids that are submitted even seconds after a bid deadline, timing is everything. Shortening the posting period threatens to undermine the open competition value-for-money objectives that lie at the heart of the public procurement process. Purchasing institutions need to buy some time somewhere without compromising open competition. Electronic bidding offers a clear solution for accelerating the bidding process while preserving an adequate window for bid submissions since electronic bids can be submitted instantly online and cut out the need for printing and shipping bottlenecks.
Trade Treaty Developments
These timing pressures are compounded by the ever-expanding network of international open procurement treaties. Those institutions that set their bid submission deadlines to the minimum amount of time required by local suppliers may actually be setting themselves up for a bid protest by engaging in a form of prohibited local preference since new treaties now penalize institutions for requiring paper bids and allow for shorter tendering windows for electronic bids. Enabling electronic bidding will help institutions address this risk by giving all eligible suppliers, regardless of location, an equal opportunity to submit their bids.
These international trade treaty developments are opening the tendering floodgates to an expanding pool of international bidders and create an irresistible pressure to adopt electronic bidding procedures.
Legal and Technological Enablers
Fortunately for procurement professionals, technology is catching up to the tendering cycle to provide the missing links required to complete the transition to paperless bidding. From solicitation drafting and posting to bid submission, evaluation, and award, these newly emerging procurement-centric technologies will help hot launch procurement institutions into a new era of strategic execution.
